Angry Birds Maker Says 2012 Will Be A Monster Year With FIVE New Games

Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds, is releasing
Angry Birds Space next week. It's the latest version of Angry
Birds, which will feature gravity-based gameplay that will make
you bend the trajectory of your bird around planetoids.

But this isn't just a game — it's the launch of a new franchise
just ahead of Rovio's next intellectual property release.

We caught up with Peter Vesterbacka, chief marketing officer of
Rovio, to find out just how important this game is. Here's what
we found out:

Rovio plans to launch FIVE new Angry Birds titles this
year. Angry Birds Space is just the first, and there
are another four planned.

Angry Birds Space is launching simultaneously with a
line of merchandise. Vesterbacka will tell you it's a
big part of Rovio being an "entertainment" company, and not
just a game company.

The first non-Angry Birds game from Rovio in three
years is coming this year. Vesterbacka was scarce on
details, but seems confident it will be as big as the Angry
Birds franchise.

Rovio now has 300 people. It's a big bump
form last year, when the company had around 100 employees.

Rovio isn't giving up on Angry Birds just yet.
Even though the company is working on a new franchise, it still
wants Angry Birds to be as big as Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse,
Vesterbacka said.

BUSINESS INSIDER: How did you guys get the idea for Angry
Birds Space?

PETER VESTERBACKA: It's a completely new angry
birds game but there are some familiar elements. It's a fun game,
we're of course hoping it will do well, but we aren't leaving
anything to chance. That's why we're teaming up with NASA.

The Angry Birds space program, the whole thing started about a
year ago. I was handling Twitter and all the tweeting on behalf of Rovio
at that time because I wanted to work with our fans. One day, I
got a tweet from NASA, asking if we'd send some pigs in space. We
exchanged a few tweets with the NASA guys. One thing led to
another, so I thought, what if we build a space game.

So the whole thing started with a twitter exchange with NASA.
We've been working with NASA very closely. We went to the last
shuttle launch. We handed out t-shirts that said "shoot for the
stars." NASA and stars and Angry Birds go pretty well
together.

We also want it to be educational somehow, We want to have
realistic gravity — we have planets, microgravity. What we did
with a video form the space station, we want to introduce gravity
for Angry Birds practically. We want to make science pulse around
Angry Birds.

It's been great working with NASA. Sometimes I feel they are more
excited about the game than we are. It's the kick-start of our
space program, there will be more stuff around space later in the
year.

BI: Where does this stand compared to Rio and the
original Angry Birds? Is this a completely new
franchise?

PV: Absolutely, we view space as a new franchise
for us. The birds, they have these superhero capabilities, they
have new personality and there are new birds. It will really take
on a life of its own, and what's really cool about this is we
have a full merchandising lineup that is launching in sync with
the game. Plush toys, a National Geographic book, a bunch of
other books, candy, everything will be available when the game
launches. It's really similar to a movie launch.

BI: Do you think Angry Birds Space will cannibalize some
players from other Angry Birds games?

PV: What we think will happen is the opposite.
When we launched Rio, we got a lift on all of our games.
We'll get a huge lift in merchandising: more toys, more
T-shirts. Just like a movie launch gives a huge boost to
merchandising, we think that will happen with Angry Birds
Space.

We're not really scared of cannibalization because Apple has had 25 billion downloads in the app
store. If you just look at our games, we haven't had 25 billion
downloads. There's plenty of room to grow, there's plenty of
people who haven't downloaded Angry Birds. It'll be very good for
the whole Angry Birds franchise and we expect all our games to
keep growing.

One example, if you look at AppData for Angry Birds: we just hit
13 million monthly actives and 3 million daily actives on
Facebook, with the launch of Valentine's
Day. We're growing extremely fast on Facebook and I think that is
something that helps us bring angry birds to new audiences, just
like our cooperation with Nokia and feature phones helps us bring angry
birds to all the emerging markets.

I think we're probably in the single digits of the market that we
can capture. We're not a games company, we've said that many
times, we are in the business of entertainment. Entertainment is
much bigger than just games, that's why we bought an animation
studio, that's why we announced a cooperation with Samsung in January at CES for Samsung TVs.
Samsung smart TVs will come with not only the game but with the
Angry Birds channel. We'll be on millions of TVs by the end of
the year. Because of the distribution platforms, one can build
these franchises much faster than what used to be the case, and
it's much faster than making a movie. Not even the expensive
moves are growing as fast as we can. I don't even know who John
Carter is.

If you look at the market and look at entertainment, it's a huge
market. We capture less than a percent of the entertainment
market. There's massive opportunity.

BI: Seems like production was way faster for Angry Birds
Space, and it still looks great. How did you guys pull that
off?

PV: Every game we do, everything we do, we are
always learning. The result is what you see in the Space game.
It's really taking things to the next level, and you can expect
to see that on some of these other platforms that we're building
on. You'll have richer graphics, more power.

What is very interesting is that last year at South by Southwest,
exactly a year ago, I was on a panel here and I said I think the
tablets will be bigger than game consoles for games, then I got a
lot of crap for that. They said consoles were for video games,
but I think what we see now, compared to consoles the graphics
capabilities are pretty comparable. I was saying before you see
the Playstation 4 or the Xbox 720 or whatever they call them, the next
generation consoles, you will see at least 2 generations of
tablets. On the gaming side, the center of gravity has moved
to smart connected devices — smartphones, tablets, connected
TVs. You can build the processing power of a tablet into a TV,
and your TV will have more processing power than your PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

BI: We've heard you guys are working on some new
intellectual property this year.

PV: We will launch more Angry Birds games this
year and we will launch a new franchise in the not-too-distant
future. We are, basically on all fronts, we are very far in
development of the next game software. We're very happy with our
road map and we think this year will be absolutely amazing for
us. We're bringing out Space, it really plays great, and also
we're really psyched about the next one and the next one and we
will know that we will have some amazing things for Christmas.

BI: Is this going to be the last Angry Birds
game?

PV: There will be more Angry Birds games — we
can't give too much detail on that. The games we're working on,
what's very important, we are doing frequent updates to all our
games. Then we're also going to have Space and that's going to
get updates. you can expect to see some amazing things coming to
Space. And there will be new Angry Birds franchises, totally new
games and products coming this year. A much, much bigger line-up
this year. Last year we only did Rio, this year we're doing 5
games, new platforms and launching a new franchise. We're keeping
pretty busy.

We also have, like, 300 people, so we should be able to do a few
more things than 12 months ago.

I think that our senior focus is we really want to make Angry
Birds a permanent part of culture. We want to make stuff that is
sustainable and will be there for a very long time. Not for a
year, but for 20 years. Hello Kitty, since 74, Mickey Mouse, I
don't even remember. We want it to be around that long.